Criticism
A professor of Kabbalah at Hebrew University of Jerusalem has bemoaned the hijacking of kabba'lah by various New Age authors and has given Halevi as an example. Joseph Dan, in his work The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, writes in footnote 57 to the introduction:
- Another distressing phenomenon is connected with the numerous books concerning kabbalah, its history, nature, and traditions, as instruction for modern living, published by "Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi" who is a nice English gentleman from Hampstead who does not know any Hebrew. His books were used as authentic, scholarly source by many, including Simo Parpola.
In 'Authorized Guardians' in Polemical Encounters (Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (ed.), Leiden:Brill, 2007; p. 89) Prof. Boaz Huss at Ben-Gurion university points at the fact that the criticism launched at Halevi does appear in the chapter 'The christian kabbalah'. These and other attempts can be viewed as 'boundary-constructing discourse' and 'othering of the enemy', depicting him as 'debased' or 'degenerated' in order to annihilate him (cp. Huss in Hammer/Von Stuckrad, 2007, xiii). Halevi lives in the London borough of Brent.
Read more about this topic: Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)